Daphne

by Justine Picardie

  'And leave it to the mercy of thieves and scoundrels?' said the man. 'You are aware, perhaps, that precious manuscripts such as these have been mutilated, both in the Reading Room of the British Museum and elsewhere? The security in these places is abysmal, and the curators are shoddy.'

  Daphne felt uncertain of how to proceed with this conversation; for she did not want to offend the man by pointing out that it was Mr Symington's former colleague, T. J. Wise, who had been rumoured to have stolen pages by surreptitiously tearing them out of manuscripts and rare books at the British Museum. 'I do see your point,' she said, carefully. 'But surely a museum would be able to conserve such a precious manuscript in more suitable conditions than a packing case?'

  'That, dear lady, is where you are entirely mistaken,' said the man. 'I can assure you that Mr Symington's knowledge of conservation techniques is second to none. Indeed, Miss Brontë's notebook will be far safer here than it would be, say, at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, where there is a flagrant disregard for proper procedure. And I must ask you, of course, to keep this matter confidential.'

  'What matter?' said Daphne, more confused than ever.

  'The little notebook that you have just seen. Or not seen,' said the man, tapping the side of his nose. 'Now, if I am not mistaken, I hear the sound of your taxi outside.'

  Daphne heard nothing; the house was silent, save for the distant banging of a door in the wind. She turned her head, as if listening, and then shrugged. 'Surely the taxi driver will ring let us know when he arrives?' she said.

  'Oh no, I think not,' said the man, but Daphne remained seated.

  'I must write a note to Mr Symington,' she said, reaching into her handbag for a pen.

  'If you have any message for Mr Symington,' said the man, 'you may give it to me in person. There are no secrets between Mr Symington and myself. We work as one together.'

  'Well, then tell him that I am most disappointed not to meet him today,' said Daphne. 'And tell him, also, that I would like to buy any Brontë manuscripts in his collection, if they are available.'

  'I am authorised to act on Mr Symington's behalf in commercial transactions, as well as literary matters,' said the man.

  'Is the notebook of Emily Brontë's poems for sale, then?' said Daphne.

  'I think not,' said the man, sadly, pressing his fingertips together in a steeple. 'But Mr Symington did leave a package that he thought you might be interested in purchasing.' He opened one of the desk drawers, and pulled out another small brown-paper parcel, which he passed over to Daphne. She unwrapped it, heart racing, hoping for something even more extraordinary than the last discovery, the original manuscript of Wuthering Heights, perhaps, with Branwell's signature on it, alongside Emily's; but she was quickly disappointed. Inside was a bound schoolbook, a Latin primer by the look of it. 'Branwell's schoolbook,' said the man, 'with his drawings inside, on the opening frontispiece.' He gestured to Daphne to open the book, and she did so, to discover a couple of roughly drawn sketches of a pugilist.

  'Yours for thirty-five pounds,' said the man, briskly. Daphne shook her head, and handed it back to him, and he looked suddenly stricken, even paler than before, yet with beads of sweat breaking out on his forehead. He returned to the packing case, and pulled out another parcel, wrapped in brown paper, and Daphne stifled a laugh, for it was absurd, like a tombola at a village fete; yet at the same time she wanted to cry, for there was something so dreadfully sad about the man. 'Perhaps you might be interested in taking Branwell's schoolbook, if I also included another manuscript of his poetry?' he'd said. 'Together, they offer an insight into his extraordinary intellect, at a very reasonable combined price of seventy-five pounds.'

  He unwrapped the manuscript, and placed it in her hands, as tenderly as if it were a baby bird. There were four pages, entitled 'Morley Hall', written in what Daphne recognised as Branwell's legible adult handwriting, rather than the microscopic childhood print of the Angrian chronicles. As before, she read the opening lines aloud:

  When lifes youth, overcast by gathering clouds

  Of cares, that come like funeral-following crowds,

  Weary of that which is, and cannot see

  A sunbeam burst upon futurity,

  It tries to cast away the woes that are

  And borrow brighter joys from times afar.

  As she spoke, the man had nodded, as if in agreement with Branwell's melancholic poetry. 'Too true, too true,' he said, and then began to cough again. Daphne, alarmed and yet also feeling herself sinking into depression, put down the manuscript, and told the man that she would pay the seventy-five pounds; though her purchase did not fill her with much enthusiasm. She felt, as she wrote out the cheque, that Symington had trapped her into tacit complicity, so that she was party to this ridiculous pretence that he was not the man in the study with her; yet at the same time, she retained a sliver of hope that the man might be telling the truth when he said his name was Morrison.

  By the time the taxi had arrived to take Daphne back to the station, she was relieved to be escaping from the house. The man's cough was worsening, and he looked feverish, which made Daphne anxious that he might be infectious with a horrible, consumptive disease, as virulent as that which had killed Branwell, then Emily and Anne, within a few months of each other. But it wasn't just a fear of physical infection taking hold of her, in that dim, cold study; she was beginning to think that his failure would be contagious. For it seemed to Daphne that a smell of failure lingered around him, and the house, a kind of mouldering dampness, against which his fever fought in vain. When he had shaken her hand in farewell, his palm felt clammy, and Daphne wiped her hand with a handkerchief once she was safely in the taxi, but his clasp remained with her tonight, his breath seemed to have stayed with her, even after she had bathed and changed her clothes.

  It was now past midnight, but Daphne lay awake and restless in her single bed at the Brontë Guest House, the frost creeping in through the crack in the window. She got up, shivering, and pulled back the curtain, so that she could see the view of the Parsonage, its stone outlines still visible in the starlight. Daphne was trying to imagine the events of the last century - Branwell staggering back to the Parsonage after an evening at the Black Bull, past the graves of his mother and aunt, buried far away from their Cornish birthplace; and were they restless, still, waiting to return to the sea, but caught here, as loving, lingering spirits?

  Branwell would be drunk, but not so much so that he did not think of his dead mother; nor was he immune to the disapproval of his sisters and father, waiting at home for him. Daphne stared into the darkness, hoping to summon up a wild-eyed, red-headed ghost, weaving his way through the graveyard, but there was no sign of him, nor any other creature, dead or alive. As for those purchases of Branwell's schoolbook and poem that now sat on the spindly bedside table: she could find nothing within the pages that redeemed either Branwell or Symington's faith in him. The boy who had doodled over his Latin primer turned into the fourth-rate writer of 'Morley Hall', an introductory fragment of a presumably unfinished epic, all lamely rhyming couplets and drearily interminable, even in these initial pages.

  And yet . . . she had not given up on Branwell, or Symington, or her book. If these were hopeless causes, she would be cutting short her trip, and leaving for London early tomorrow morning, then catching the night-train home to Cornwall. But instead, she was staying in Yorkshire for another two days, as planned, determined to make use of the library at the Parsonage, and to walk in the footsteps of the Brontës, along the cobbled streets of Haworth, and up across the moors behind their home. She'd fantasised about meeting her rival biographer on the doorstep of the Parsonage - looking directly into Winifred Gerin's eyes, and telling her that Branwell was hers, and hers alone. But there had been no sightings so far of Miss Gerin, and Daphne wondered whether the woman was avoiding her.

  The church bells chimed once, and Daphne shivered, and climbed back into bed. Nothing would be gained if she caught cold; she m
ust be practical and level-headed if she was to edge ahead of Miss Gerin. Tomorrow morning, she had an appointment with Mr Mitchell, the custodian of the Parsonage, and the opportunity to study more of Branwell's manuscripts. She'd already had one encounter with Mr Mitchell, soon after arriving at Haworth, three days ago - he had spent a great deal of time telling her about his difficulties with the workmen who were building his new quarters at the Parsonage, and how his wife did not want the stove where they had put it. Daphne had felt like crying with frustration, thinking of the manuscripts waiting for her, but not wanting to offend Mr Mitchell, who was their guardian. She had hoped that Mitchell could tell her some interesting stories about the Brontës, given that he was born and bred in Haworth. But when she had tried to steer his conversation away from the builders and towards John Brown, the sexton who had been Branwell's friend and fellow Freemason, Mitchell started talking about one of Brown's descendants, a great-grandson who went to Australia and had three children out there.

  Daphne was struck, suddenly, by the idea of a putative biographer coming to Fowey in a hundred years' time, to seek out information about herself . . . The biographer would doubtless end up talking to the great-nephew of a long-dead housemaid at Menabilly, who'd say something about Lady Browning writing in a hut in the woods, and then it would get all confused, the biographer would think this referred to the cottage in the woods, the one where the old ladies had lived -a pair of spiritualists, according to the housemaids, Miss Phillips and her companion, Miss Wilcox, in their witch's cottage down the hill from Menabilly. And then the story would get round that Daphne had called up the spirits, and got them to write her books, while she was in a trance or something.

  She laughed to herself, as she huddled under the eiderdown, and switched out the bedside light. But in the darkness, she wished that she could call up the spirits, out of all those dried-up manuscripts. If only Branwell's ghost could appear to her now, and Emily and Charlotte and Anne. She would not be frightened of them, however wraith-like and consumptive their appearance; she would greet them as they stepped out of the shadows. But the Parsonage had just been redecorated with new wallpaper and fresh paint, and Daphne feared that the Brontës had fled from the workmen and the tourists and the endless intrusions. So be it. She could wait for them, at least for a little while longer . . . And perhaps they were lying in wait for her, still.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Newlay Grove, January 1960

  Symington felt that he was burning up with anxiety, and his throat was constricted, his stomach twisted. He still could not understand why he pretended to be someone else when Daphne came to visit him last month; it was inexplicable, given how much he had been looking forward to meeting her. And yet, perhaps he had never believed that the meeting would actually happen; for why else had he kept it a secret from Beatrice? Why else had he ensured that Beatrice was out of the house when Daphne arrived, for he had been intent that the two women should not meet.

  He could not remember when he took the decision to say that he was Morrison, a name that he had plucked out of the air, like a passing feather, though it was his mother's maiden name, of course, now that he came to think of it, and the name of her father's printing firm. But the more that he thought of the moment when Daphne arrived at his front door, the more it seemed to him that his assumption of another identity was not a decision; the words had simply floated out of his mouth, before he could stop them and stuff them back down his throat again.

  She had looked so fine, standing there on his doorstep, in her grey flannel trousers and glossy blonde hair; so expensive, with that silk scarf knotted at her neck, and the pearl earrings, and a big diamond ring on her wedding finger. And he had felt shabby and provincial and inconsequential, when he had wanted to appear before her as a lofty scholar, authoritative and urbane, like a professor giving a tutorial to a nayve young girl.

  'Lady Browning . . .' As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he had forgotten himself, forgotten everything. She was Lady Browning, the wife of a war hero, and he was an impoverished, unemployed librarian. Worse, he was disgraced. He was a disgrace. He had nothing, and she had everything.

  Except Emily's notebook: he had that, but Daphne had not known he had it. That was what had made him behave so foolishly: he wanted her to know that he possessed something of such value. It was priceless, and it was his. But now he was filled with panicky dread: for in showing her Emily's notebook, he had given away his secret. Had Daphne realised that the notebook was not his to show? Had her research been thorough enough - had she delved deep enough - to know that this was the notebook that had gone missing from Sir Alfred Law's collection at Honresfeld, and that modest Mr Symington, a man as quiet as a mouse, was the last person to have it in his possession?

  But he had never intended to steal the Honresfeld notebook; just as he had never meant to keep the fragments of poetry bound together in green morocco leather, that little volume he had taken from the Brontë Parsonage nearly thirty years ago, in an attempt to prove that the handwriting was Branwell's rather than Emily's. It was Wise's fault, not Symington's, for attributing Branwell's verse to Emily in order to sell it to the highest bidder; and sold it was, to a rich man foolish enough to accept Wise's authentication, when anyone with an ounce of sense could see that it was Branwell's handwriting, not Emily's; and Branwell, therefore, who had written 'The Heart which cannot know another'.

  That is what he had wanted to tell Daphne; and to show her Branwell's poem, alongside Emily's verses, so that together they could compare the handwriting, becoming collaborators in their endeavours. But when it came to it, he had made a mess of the meeting. 'Just like you make a mess of everything,' hissed his mother's voice into his right ear, which was hurting, like the rest of his feverish, aching body.

  And now Daphne was back in Cornwall, silent and distant, no letters sent between the two of them since the meeting last month, as though a veil had been drawn over it, to cover up their mutual embarrassment.Unless, of course, she'd fallen for his cover as Morrison, but that would mean she had never seen a photograph of him, and she must have come across a picture somewhere, in an old magazine article about the Brontë Society, perhaps. . .just as she must have encountered a reference to the missing Honresfeld notebook of Emily's poetry.

  As his thoughts spiralled in upon themselves, Symington's head felt as if it would crack open; something had to give, for the tension was intolerable, it felt as if there was a boiling steam inside him. 'You have always been full of hot air,' whispered his mother.

  Meanwhile, Beatrice was grumbling and nagging him about their debts, insisting that they must sell the house; her demands that he pay attention to her growing ever more shrill, but she would have to wait, he would not move, he could not move from his chair in the study. 'Go to bed, Alex,' she was saying to him. 'Go to bed, and I will ring for the doctor.'

  'There is nothing a doctor can do for me,' said Symington, but he did not know if she could hear him; his voice was drowned out by his coughing, and he was burning up, everything was burning, everything consumed at last . . .

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Hampstead, 1 September

  I've spent so many years in education that September always seems like a beginning, but I know it's an ending, as well. This year, there's no fresh start of a term, though I've found a new job, at a local bookshop. I've got to earn some money - I've got to start supporting myself, instead of relying on Paul - and I'm about to move out of his house, and start paying the rent on a room of my own. It was his suggestion that I go, but he was right; I can't go on living with him, like a sleepwalker. That was his description for our marriage - 'sleepwalking' - and at first, I didn't understand what he meant, but now I do, and I can see it was a bit like dreaming, though not in a good way; it was like one of those dreams when you're watching yourself, as if you have no control over the narrative, and things just happen . . .

  Everything unravelled between us after I came back from Menabilly
. Paul was in the hotel, waiting for me, white-faced and angry. He said he had been worried, that he was just about to call the police and report me as missing. 'We can't go on like this,' he said, and I thought, what a cliché, but it was true. I was too tired to cry, or to argue with him; I just nodded my head, and had a shower, and got into bed. He put his arms around me, and said he was sorry, that he shouldn't have got involved with me so soon after Rachel leaving him, and he was too old for me, anyway. 'What you mean is I'm too young for you,' I said, and he said, 'It doesn't matter which way you phrase it, we're just not meant to be together.'

  'Did you ever love me?' I said to him, resting my head against his shoulder.

  'I thought I did,' he said. 'But I was still in a mess over Rachel, and I couldn't think straight. I thought I was falling in love with a girl who was completely different to Rachel - you were so young and guileless, such an innocent. And then after we got married, and you came to live with me, I wondered if I'd fallen in love with a young Rachel, as if you were what she had once been, before it all went wrong.'

  'But I'm not like Rachel,' I said. 'You must be able to see that?'

  'I don't know whether I'm seeing anything clearly,' said Paul. 'I'm too confused to trust myself, or anyone else, including you.'

  Everything felt so broken that night - even the words we said to each other, all of it broken-down and impossible to fix; even when we were making love, and he was as passionate as the first time, but I knew it was the last. Afterwards, in the darkness, I said, 'I've got something to tell you.'

  'I already know what it is,' he said. 'I've already spoken to Rachel. I rang her tonight, because I couldn't think of anyone else to talk to.'

  'Rachel told you we'd met?' I said.

  'She told me that she had come to the house, to collect her books and that you went with her to Haworth.' His voice sounded flat, not angry, just exhausted. I wanted to say, 'Is there anyone else?' But of course there was, it was pointless asking; I knew that Rachel was on his mind, that he'd not yet had a chance to work out what he felt about her, because he'd thought that by convincing himself he was in love with me, that would obliterate all of his misery and uncertainty about Rachel. It didn't work, and how could it? I was just a red herring, a wrong turning on his map. I was a forged signature, and Rachel was the real thing.